Burglar With Heart Chooses Life Over Money Intruder Calls 911 When Elderly Woman Develops Chest Pains After Surprise

In 70 years, Erma has seen a lot, including the flash of a burglar’s white T-shirt as he skulked through her house.

But this was no ordinary outlaw.

When Erma panicked and started to have chest pains, the burglar tried to find her heart medicine and then called 911 for help.

“Am I lucky? Oh yes, yes. Definitely,” said Erma, who asked that her last name not be disclosed. “I mean, of all the things that could have happened. I guess I got one that was compassionate.”

The “burglar with a heart,” as Seattle Police now call him, entered Erma’s small home recently through an open sliding-glass door. She was in the living room watching television at 10 that night when her cat “came tearing in here and stopped and looked back toward the kitchen,” she said.

“She ran around my chair, and her eyes were really big. Something scared her, but it never dawned on me that it was a person. She’s kind of a skittish thing, and I thought it was a rat.”

Erma got up and walked into the kitchen, then into the bathroom and down the hall to two bedrooms of the home she has occupied for 51 years. As she started into one room, she glimpsed a man in a white T-shirt and started screaming.

He grabbed her from behind and put his hand over her mouth. “I’m not going to hurt you. I just want money,” he told her, his breath tinged with the smell of stale beer.

“He had on a pair of latex gloves, and I’m kind of claustrophobic, so I started struggling,” Erma said. “It caused me to have chest pains, and I kind of buckled.”

Obviously distressed, she asked him to find her nitroglycerin pills and, to her surprise, he obliged, rummaging through the night stand drawer and pulling out several vials, all the wrong ones. She gestured to the pills on top of the night stand, but he didn’t understand her.

Her breathing grew worse. After three bypass operations, her heart - if not her spunk - is fragile.

Increasingly worried, the man finally said he would call 911 for help. “I didn’t believe him,” Erma said. But off he went to the living room to pick up the phone.

“Trace this call. A woman’s dying!” he told the operator, then left the phone off the hook. He returned to the bedroom, told Erma he was leaving and ran out empty-handed.

Seattle Police and medics arrived immediately and treated her with oxygen. “They just stood and shook their heads,” she said. “They couldn’t believe he would do that.”

In fact, police spokeswoman Christie-Lynne Bonner said, “Nobody can remember a case like this - where a thief attempts a burglary and ends up assisting the victim.”

Erma is relieved the intruder, who is still at large, didn’t hurt her. But “I will tell you this,” she said, “my alarm is on all the time now.”